An Unexpected Skill Set I Learned From Cinderella

To be honest, I don’t understand why Cinderella (1950) in particular gets branded as anti-feminist. Some people say that it teaches girls to be passive and that their only worthwhile merit is their appearance, but the actual film Cinderella doesn’t force expectations of women onto young girls. Instead, it might actually teach them some important skills such as kindness in the face of life’s difficulties and how to realistically survive a hostage situation.

I think the misunderstanding comes from taking Cinderella’s actions out of context. Watching the movie without the suggestion that Cinderella is a pretty girl with luck on her side reveals that she actually survived a long-term hostage situation and that her mental and emotional states were intact enough to let her hope for her escape, even if it wasn’t necessarily plausible. The movie even directly states that she was “humiliated, abused, and finally forced to become a servant in her own house”. In other words, she was groomed into living as a hostage to her stepmother.

Why do some people not recognize that Cinderella is in a hostage situation? For one, her situation doesn’t meet conventional expectations of an armed robber, terrorists in a foreign country, or strange guys with a car in the middle of the night. For another, she doesn’t beg, fight back, or make conventional plans to…